The first giveaway is done. Here's what happens next.

This morning, I sat at my kitchen table with a list of names and picked the winner of our first SOURCE Starter giveaway. Over 700 people entered, only one winner. 

It's a stranger thing to actually do than I thought it would be. Every entry on that list was a real person. Someone who came across us on Facebook or got pointed our way by a friend, and decided, on the strength of very little, to hand over their email address and say "sure, I'll keep an eye on this." That's not nothing. People are protective of their inboxes for good reason. Anyone who chose to open theirs to us was extending a small amount of trust to a company they'd never heard of a few weeks ago.

I kept thinking about that as I scrolled. There were folks from states I've never been to. A few names I recognized as backers from the original Kickstarter, which made me grin. A surprising number of dads, going by their email signatures, which tracks with what we've been hearing from players. Tabletop is one of the few hobbies that lets a parent and a kid sit at the same table for three hours without anyone reaching for a phone, and that's the kind of thing people want more of right now, not less.

I used a random number generator to pick the winner. It felt anticlimactic in the way most fair things do. No drumroll, no envelope, just a number that lined up with a row in a spreadsheet. The winner has been notified and we're getting their prize sorted on our end. I'm not going to put their name here without checking with them first. They get to decide how loud they want to be about it.

Now here's the part that actually matters, and the reason I'm writing this post instead of just sending a quiet email to the winner.

We're doing this again.

I never wanted the giveaway to be a one-and-done thing. The whole point of building Adventure Together this way, slow, in public, with a real list of real people, is that the friends who showed up early get to keep showing up. So, if you entered the first one, you're already entered for the next one. You don't need to do anything. As long as you stay on the list, your name goes back in the bowl. Same goes for the one after that, and the one after that.

The next giveaway is in the works right now. I'm not going to put a date on it yet because I'd rather hit it cleanly than commit to a timeline I can't keep. But it's close, and the pattern from here forward is that we'll be running these on a rhythm. The list grows. The pool of names grows. The chance that one of yours gets pulled out of the bowl grows along with it.

A quick word about the folks who didn't win this round. I know that's most of you. I've entered enough giveaways myself to know how it feels to refresh an email and not see the message you were hoping for. The thing I'd ask you to remember is that you're not standing in line for a one-shot lottery. You're a name on a list that I personally see every time I open the file. When the next one rolls around, you're already in. When the one after that rolls around, you're already in. You don't have to do anything to keep your spot except not unsubscribe.

That's a pretty low bar. We're going to do our best to make it worth keeping.

In the meantime, the work continues. There's a lot in motion right now. SOURCE is ramping up production on the next game and the next environment theme. We're working to bring more games and worlds onto the platform, and to put real tools in the hands of indie teams who want to build and publish their own. The slow build of putting this whole company together in a way I'd actually be proud of in five years. I'll keep writing about all of it here. Some of it will be useful to you. Some of it will be the kind of thing only friends who care about how the sausage gets made will want to read. Some of it will just be the team thinking out loud the way I'm doing right now.

If you're reading this and you haven't been around long, the manifesto on the about page is the best place to get a sense of what we're trying to do. The short version is that we don't think adventure is for other people, and we don't think the friends around your table are an afterthought. The longer version is written one sentence at a time over a lot of late nights, and we add to it as we go.

To everyone who entered the first one: thank you. Not in a polished marketing way. In the actual way. You took a small risk on a small company, and that's the thing this whole project rests on. Without you, it doesn't work. With you, it has a chance to become the kind of place I keep telling people I want it to be.

What did you enter the giveaway hoping to find here? I read every reply.

We are the nudge out the door, and a promise the world is ahead.

Keep Adventuring,
Nick (and the rest of Team Adventure Together)